You certainly can. Your parents might think it's self-indulgent compared to traditional majors, so you might have to explain economic realities to them. It's a $10 billion-a-year industry, and it needs people trained in the complex technology and design it takes to make a game.
IN THE COMMENTS: Warnings that employees do poorly in the video game industry.
September 23, 2005
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11 comments:
You could, but since everybody wants to be a rockstar game maker, the pay is low, the hours are horrible, and the risk is high.
Steve: that's exactly what most all my developer friends say - they'd love to work in that realm, but they like to have some disposable income and a life.
Recently I heard that in the UK game production is considered so potentially profitable that subsidy is available for people who want to start those sorts of companies.
Steve is exactly right. It may be a $10 billion industry, but it is not one that benefits the workers. I'm not particularly fond of unions, but those developers really need to form a guild and insist that the types of royalties paid to the voice actors go to the heads down, in the trenches developers too.
I have two friends who work for two different video game companies here in Madison. To put it diplomatically, you have to want to make video games pretty badly.
Oh, the hell with diplomacy. These guys regularly put in 50 hour weeks, but when deadlines loom they have to settle for catching two or three hours of sleep on an office couch. One of my friends took a $15,000 pay cut to go from commercial software development (graphic user interfaces) to do basically the same work on video games, many more hours a week.
Even so, I have a third friend who, knowing all this, wants to break into the business.
Matthew: Exactly. That is why no guild is necessary and why any attempt to start one would fail. People don't go into this field for the money, they do it because they love gaming. I have a freind who says the same thing. I probably make twice what he does in my "traditional" programming job, but he wouldn't trade places for anything. When you think of game programming, the relevant metaphor is painter or poet, not accountant.
So that gives people a right to screw them over?
I agree with the guild (or heck, call it a union if that's what it is) idea. Here is why:
Let me tell you about a man named Jim. He loved what he did. And he was very, very good at it. He created something beautiful, and wanted to share it with the world. And he found some people in the right industry and he did share it with the world.
Later, Jim's work was so popular that he was known the world over. And he was still living just above the poverty line because he wasn't an accountant, and the people who made millions off of Jim barely gave him enough to eat. In fact, Jim once owned a collection of antique instruments, and delighted in playing old songs on instruments from the same time. But he had to hock them before he started selling records.
Jim tragically died in a plane crash at age 30, and his family still doesn't get any royalties from his creations.
Operator, let's forget about this call
There's no one there I really wanted to talk to
Thank you for your time
Oh you've been so much more than kind
And you can keep the dime
Jim Croce, 1943-1973.
Not everybody's talents run to finances.
A Professional organization would prevent these people from being taken advantage of.
One problem here is that a lot of the gaming programming has gone off-shore, to, for example, India, where you have a lot of very talented programmers willing to work for a lot less than they would here (and still live better than most others in that country).
Not to mention that if Britain's subsidising the industry, we might end up with a 'dumping' situation not completely unlike what got us into the whole steel tariff ugliness.
That's completely misleading Bruce.
Yes - tech jobs have moved to India, but the pay continues to rise quite steadily.
Sure - it stalled or went down a little during the dot com bust, but that had nothing to do with India.
Tech is bouncing back again and salaries are rising.
I'm somewhat of an expert in this area. I work in the field and I have plenty of people who work for me in India too.
Sure - we're hiring a lot there. But the price for programmers here in New York keeps going up, up, up.
It's pure supply and demand. More programmers would rather be coding for video game companies than insurance companies. Shocker.
I don't see how this is any different from going to college with the intention of being a writer or an artist. Your hourly pay is going to suck, sure, but you get to do something creative and enjoyable.
Can't you say the same about studying Law or Medicine, the investment in time and effort and the strains these disciplines place on new hires and interns are legendary.
No job is worth it if your hearts not in it, all jobs have horror stories and tales of worker exploitation.
Is anyone really going to mention the hours spent reading blogs, playing fantasy football or looking at porn while on the clock, no I think not, but on the other hand an employer demands that you work a 90 hour week to finish a project and that story will last years.
The videogame industry is well compensated, the main problem is that much of the work is highly repetitive, technical and not creative, the game designers get the fun, creative bits of the job, but they are few and far between the rest are glorified data entry clerks and debuggers (albeit specialized, well trained, and often talented in their own right, and decently compensated).
Now if you wanna discuss an industry that needs unionizing what about the $20Billion per annum adult entertainment industry (more than film and video games combined)?
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